Ukiah woman accused of assault in DUI case awaits jury's verdict

A jury of 10 women and two men retired to deliberate Thursday afternoon in the Mendocino County Superior Court case of a Ukiah woman accused of assault with a deadly weapon for allegedly driving through her neighbors' backyard fence and crashing into their house while drunk.

Joan Rainville allegedly had a blood-alcohol level of 0.25 -- more than three times the legal limit -- when she got behind the wheel of her mother's 2008 Toyota Camry and accelerated forward instead of backing out of her parking space just before 9 p.m. May 26, 2013. She allegedly plowed through her neighbors' fence and into their backyard, where they were entertaining guests on the patio, narrowly missed a seated guest and stopped when she hit their house and cracked a wall, on the other side of which an 8-year-old boy was sleeping.

"So a near miss is a nothing?" said prosecutor Paul Sequeira of the Mendocino County District Attorney's Office as he gave his closing statement to the jury Thursday afternoon.

He described how the car had stopped momentarily, seemingly caught on the cement lip of the patio, with Rainville still revving the engine until the car again charged forward and hit the house.

"What if she had hit the gas a little harder and hurt the boy?" Sequeira said. "Do we have to wait for that?"

Rainville's trial began Monday with jury selection, and the prosecution rested Thursday morning after Sequeira produced evidence that Rainville had four prior DUI convictions since 1998, two of them involving crashes.

Her defense attorney, Andrew Higgins of the Mendocino County Public Defender's Office, mentioned several times to the jury during his closing statements that no one had been injured in any of Rainville's three DUI crashes.

Higgins and Sequeira agreed that injury -- or any touching at all -- didn't need to be proven for the jury to convict Rainville of assault with a deadly weapon.

To find Rainville guilty of the assault charge, Sequeira said, the jury needed to find that she knew her actions would "probably and directly" result in someone being hurt.

Sequeira likened the case to a scenario where a gunman shoots at someone and misses, saying Rainville knew because of her prior DUI crashes and court appearances that driving drunk was dangerous, and did it anyway on the night she drove through her neighbor's fence.

"We're not saying that she drove at somebody on purpose, or that she intended to hurt somebody," Sequeira said. "What we're trying to punish is the dangerous act. Should we wait 'til someone gets hurt or injured?

He urged the jury to use the facts, the law and common sense to find a verdict.

"What's more dangerous: I'm angry, and I'm going to take a gun and go after someone and try to shoot them, or drinking to such a high level that when I drive around town, everybody I pass is in danger instead of one person?" Sequeira said.

A drunken driver is 160 times more likely to crash than a sober driver, he argued.

"And who bears that risk? Us? And it's OK?" Sequeira said, reiterating that a car can be a dangerous weapon in the right circumstances. "Who wins that deadly lottery someday?"

Higgins told the jury that, despite Sequeira's argument that a reasonable person with Rainville's history would have known driving drunk could hurt someone, Rainville had never hurt anyone in any of her prior DUI incidents.

He also reminded the jury it could only use Rainville's history to evaluate her knowledge of the risk.

"However you feel, you must follow the law," Higgins said.

Finding that her actions "could" hurt someone wasn't enough to prove assault, he argued. The requirement was to find that driving under the influence would "probably result in the application of force."

He cited testimony from two officers, one of whom said that out of 1,000 or more DUI investigations, 200 involved crashes. Another officer had said out of 1,200 crashes, fewer than half -- between 400 and 500 -- were DUI-related.

To illustrate the difference between whether driving drunk means a crash will "probably" happen or is "35 to 40 times more likely," he used the example of buying a lottery ticket.

"If I buy one ... ticket, my chances are one in -- a lot -- of winning the jackpot," he said. "If I buy 35 to 40 more, my chances of winning go up 35 to 40 more times. Am I going to win just because it's 35 or 40 more times likely?"

He continued, "You have no evidence to suggest that driving under the influence will probably cause an accident, or that it will probably cause injury. No evidence."

Convicting Rainville of assault with a deadly weapon in connection with the DUI charges, Higgins argued, would send the message that anyone with the same knowledge Rainville had -- including "someone sitting in the courtroom" hearing the evidence in her case -- could be pulled over charged with assault after having "a glass of wine too many."

In his rebuttal, Sequeira called that argument a "cheap emotional trick" aimed at scaring the jury.

"Really?" Sequeira said. "He's saying you can't convict her because it could happen to you?"

Sequeira reiterated that Rainville's blood-alcohol levels had risen to more than four times the legal limit in prior cases, and that judges had told her repeatedly that she could hurt someone if she kept driving under the influence of alcohol.

He read a transcript from a 2005 court case where Rainville pleaded guilty to DUI, detailing a judge's conversation with Rainville where he asked her if she had "learned enough lessons."

In the transcript, Rainville answers, "God, you would think by now I would have," according to Sequeira, and the judge answers, "I hope so. I hope this is a wake-up call."

He told the jury that Rainville would not change her behavior, and that even if they believed she was addicted to alcohol and couldn't help herself, "There is no such addiction to driving."

Sequeira concluded, saying, "You know what, if she wants to put the bottle to her head and pull the trigger, that's up to her. But she can't point it at all of us and spray it all around and have us say that's OK, no harm, no foul."

Tiffany Revelle can be reached at udjtr@ukiahdj.com, on Twitter @TiffanyRevelle or at 468-3523.